Suspected ISI agent held in Meerut.

MEERUT: In what could lead to unearthing of a major racket involving transfer of secret military information to Pakistan's Inter-State Intelligence (ISI) for money, Special Task Force of Uttar Pradesh arrested a man, suspected to be an ISI agent, from Meerut on Saturday.

The suspect has been identified as Asif Ali, a resident of Purva Fayyaz Ali that falls under Delhi Gate police station. Asif was arrested by the Meerut field unit of STF on the instance of Noida SP, STF, Umesh Singh.

At the time of arrest, Asif was found in possession of classified documents of Indian Army, maps and two mobile phones.

During interrogation, he confessed that he had been to Pakistan for at least 20 times and was married to one Ruksana Kausar of Karachi. While Asif was there, he met an ISI operative, Zahid, about eight years ago. According to Asif, he has been passing on secrets military information to the ISI ever since.

Elaborating on Asif's modus operandi, Umesh Singh said, "Asif has confessed that he had been transferring money to the bank accounts of two Junior Commissioned Officers (JCOs) of Indian Army, one of whom is retired and stays in Kolkata. The other one is staying in Hyderabad. The ISI operative at Karachi had provided Asif a debit card from which he would withdraw money to be given to the army personnel in exchange for military secrets."

According to Singh, the two army personnel, Madan Mohan Pal and Patan Kumar Poddar, were arrested even earlier for transferring classified information to ISI agents. During interrogation it also came to light that Asif had thrice transferred money into the bank account of Pal while Poddar had once received an amount of Rs 10,000 from him.

During interrogation, Asif revealed that he had purchased a laptop and gifted it to the son of an army officer stationed at Babina Cantonment of Jhansi. To the investigators' utter dismay, Asif had forwarded the media access control address of the laptop to the ISI operative in Karachi. The probing officials are trying to ascertain if the laptop has led to any major information leak.

During a search operation at Asif's house, police recovered passbooks and checkbooks of various banks, six SIM cards, including one of Pakistan, passport and three mobile phones.